Pentagon analyzing Iranian footage of US drone

[Lankan Ranger]

Pentagon analyzing Iranian footage of US drone

American experts are analyzing Iranian footage of what appeared to be a downed US drone that allegedly entered Iran's airspace last week, the Pentagon said Thursday.

"We've had a chance to look at the imagery. We have people looking at it," said Captain John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, noting that the analysts are not "just military personnel," but declining to provide specific details.

Iranian state television earlier aired footage of what it said was the captured drone, showing what appeared to be an RQ-170 Sentinel aircraft with little visible damage.

The footage showed a cream-colored aircraft being examined by two commanders of Tehran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are in charge of the country's air defenses.

One of them, aerospace unit Brigadier General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh claimed the drone had been captured through a cyber attack.

The RQ-170 Sentinel is a high-altitude stealth reconnaissance drone made by Lockheed Martin whose existence was exposed in 2009 by specialized reviews and later confirmed by the US Air Force in 2010.

Iranian media said late Sunday that the unmanned aerial vehicle was shot down after making an incursion slightly into Iranian airspace. But no precise indication has been given by Iranian officials on where it crashed.

US media said the drone crashed in eastern Iran probably due to a technical fault. The Pentagon has confirmed it lost a drone but declined to acknowledge that it was downed in Iran or that it was operated by the CIA.

Despite US fears that Iran could access and make use of highly-advanced technology found in the drone, an American official said Wednesday that the United States had doubts "the Iranians have the expertise" to exploit the technology found in the wrecked vehicle.

The New York Times reported that the drone was part of a surveillance program that has frequently sent the hard-to-detect aircraft into Iran to map suspected nuclear sites.

The crash came at a time of heightened political tension over Iran's nuclear program, with speculation rife that Israel is mulling air strikes against Iranian atomic facilities, with or without US backing.

AFP: Pentagon analyzing Iranian footage of US drone

 

[Lankan Ranger]

John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org told CNN that he guessed that the "drone" showed was a mock-up prepared for a parade, noting that the wings in the video droop down, while a real drone would have higher wings in the center.

However, military aviation expert Bill Sweetman told CNN he believed that the drone displayed was real. Sweetman stated that it was most likely that the Iranians did not shoot down the plane (citing the lack of burn marks, holes, or outward damage), or hack into the system.

Instead, Sweetman told CNN that a system failure downed the plane, and that the plane could be intact from a what is known as a "flat spin" or "falling leaf departure," which would result in damage to the belly of the aircraft but little damage to other components. Sweetman noted a dent along the leading edge of the aircraft, noting that "The question is did that happen in the accident or whether they took them off to move the aircraft."

 

[Lankan Ranger]

I think a system failure may be the main reason for crash of RQ-170 Sentinel.

It won’t be easy to shot down RQ-170 Sentinel.

 

[Abii]

FOX's military insiders confirmed that it's real and a few others have also said it's real.

damage control in 3...2...1...

What we know so far:

1) Iran has the drone, as confirmed by the Pentagon

2) Iran showed pics of a drone


Now, what would Iran have to gain by showing a fake mock up when even the Pentagon has said that Iran has it? And if this is a mock up, then it must be the best mock in the history of mock ups (considering that it was made in a day lmao)

 

[Lankan Ranger]

 

[bdslph]

Iran displays purported US drone - YouTube

 

[StandForInsaf]

this drone was visible on radar ?
Should be checked if it returns radar waves or absorbs them , i don't know Iranians can reverse engineer it or just wasting time by displaying it, their was no need to display in public however they might want to create some public impression.

 

[Obambam]

this drone was visible on radar ?
Should be checked if it returns radar waves or absorbs them , i don't know Iranians can reverse engineer it or just wasting time by displaying it, their was no need to display in public however they might want to create some public impression.

Can't doubt them though. The Americans did just that and see what they now have in their hands. We will see in due time what they can make of it. Meanwhile we should also keep an eye out on Russia and China's progress in this particular field

 

[Arian]

As I said before, even if the drone shown on the footage is a mock-up then you should definitely praise Iran for two things:

1- Detecting and Tracking a top-secret 'stealth' drone to know that it has gone done and to know that it was flying over Iranian space.
2- Coming up with a perfect mock-up of such an advanced aerodynamic structure in just less than 2 days in a way that even some military experts think that it's real.

Not many countries on the planet can do those two things.

 

[Al Bhatti]

I think a system failure may be the main reason for crash of RQ-170 Sentinel.

It won’t be easy to shot down RQ-170 Sentinel.

If this is indeed a US UAV then questions arising from all this.

In many big private/public institutions and sensitive government institution the system/records/servers have a backup, the backup again has a backup and that backup again has a backup.

Now here we are talking about a hi tech state of art military piece of hardware and surely it is supposed to have some sort of a system backup which takes over the system and can give the controllers some control in case something happens to the on board system (one backup behind the system and surely another backup for that back up if not more that). And again, they would have had placed some sort of system in place in case the frequency is hacked (taken over).

When military product manufacturers manufacture something they keep in mind the worst possible scenario that may be possible for the product and don't leave anything to chance, don't they?

Let us assume the on board system failed somehow, in this case the backup is supposed to take over. Did that back up also fail? Let us assume that back up failed to take over, did the second back up also fail to take over (if there were 2 back ups if not more)?

Is it possible for the system and all the related backups to fail all together?

Well, I may be very much wrong, but so far I still feel there is something else behind the apparent "losing control" of the UAV. keeping in mind of what happened in Lebanon some weeks back when Israelis apparently "lost" a UAV and later it was known that it was a military trick by the Israelis.

Or maybe there is an all together different angle to all this.

http://www.defence.pk/forums/world-...th-uav-rq-170-downed-iran-50.html#post2374784

 

[pkd]

Iran and the Sentinel Drone: The Mouse Roars

WASHINGTON -- In the never-ending game of cat-and-mouse that is the secret arms race between offensive stealth systems and defensive radars, the mouse just captured a bit of catnip. That’s the implicit message behind video released on Thursday by Iranian state television purporting to show a surprisingly intact RQ-170 Sentinel drone that U.S. officials confirm went missing earlier this week. Iranian officials have promised to reverse engineer the stealthy drone, which carries advanced surveillance, communications, and radar systems, and was almost certainly spying on Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons complex. Iranian officers shown inspecting the drone, though, looked as if they would first have to find the “on” switch (see GSN, Dec. 8).

“From the video it looks like Iran has secured an intact RQ-170 drone, and that is a significant blow to U.S. intelligence-gathering because Iran now has a clearer idea of how we are spying on them, but they lack the capability to reverse engineer the drone to produce a functioning aircraft of their own,” said Loren Thompson, a defense and aerospace expert with the Lexington Institute, a defense consulting firm in Virginia. The Iranians are also unlikely to be able to translate the knowledge gained from the drone, he said, into effective air defenses against stealthy aircraft. “The bigger concern is that the Chinese and Russians will no doubt soon be crawling all over the drone themselves,” said Thompson. “But they already have a pretty good understanding of stealth technology, and they have been incorporating it into their own military aircraft for some time.”

There are still many unanswered questions surrounding the apparent loss of the secret drone, dubbed the “Beast of Kandahar” after one was photographed on a flight line in Afghanistan in 2009. How did U.S. operators lose control of the robotic aircraft? Why didn't it automatically fly back to base when links with controllers were severed, as most such drones are reportedly programmed to do? Why was an onboard self-destruct system not activated? Or was it, but malfunctioned?

What is known about the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, which was first fielded in 2007, convinces a number of experts that its capture by the Iranians represents an embarrassing tactical setback for the U.S. intelligence community, rather than a crisis of strategic proportions. Probably the most sensitive technology on the aircraft, for instance, is embedded in heavily encrypted software that probably has been rendered inoperative. The drone’s chief surveillance technology is a single-channel, full-motion video system that has already been eclipsed by more sophisticated wide-area surveillance systems such as the Air Force’s “Gorgon Stare,” which has been installed in Reaper drones since last year. In terms of stealth capabilities, the bat-wing-shaped Sentinel closely resembles the B-2 stealth bomber, which is 1980s-vintage stealth technology.

“I don’t want to downplay the loss of the RQ-170 because for the United States this is not a happy occurrence, but it’s not really that sophisticated of an aircraft,” said David Fulghum, a military aircraft analyst at Aviation Week. “The Iranians can try and reverse engineer the drone but they can’t replicate it, and while the Chinese and Russians could, by the time they could field an aircraft based on the design it would be at least a generation or two behind state-of-the-art stealth aircraft.”

Of course, the recent loss of the RQ-170 is not the first time that U.S. stealth technology has fallen into the wrong hands. A stealth helicopter crash-landed in Pakistan during the Special Forces raid on Osama bin Laden’s complex earlier this year, for instance, and an F-117 stealth bomber was downed in the Balkans in 1999 and captured by Serbian forces. In both instances, U.S. officials assumed that their qualitative edge in stealth technology had been at least partially compromised.

“One of the rules of warfare is that eventually the other side is going to get hold of your weapons, and we can assume by the loss of the helicopter and apparently the drone that China and Russia are going to get a look at their stealth characteristics,” said Mark Lowenthal, former assistant director for analysis and production at the CIA. “That’s a long way from being able to manufacture their own such stealth systems, however, and both countries already understand the basic physics of stealth anyway. So the loss of a stealth drone is unfortunate, but I don’t see it as a major crisis. Rather, I think it was inevitable.”

NTI: Global Security Newswire - Iran and the Sentinel Drone: The Mouse Roars

 

[gambit]

As I said before, even if the drone shown on the footage is a mock-up then you should definitely praise Iran for two things:

1- Detecting and Tracking a top-secret 'stealth' drone to know that it has gone done and to know that it was flying over Iranian space.
2- Coming up with a perfect mock-up of such an advanced aerodynamic structure in just less than 2 days in a way that even some military experts think that it's real.

Not many countries on the planet can do those two things.

Are you really serious? The flying wing design is known since WW II with the Horten 229, Nazi Germany's attempt to have a long range and high payload aircraft. It was incidentally discovered that the shape itself has low radar observability. So if the desire is to have a long range, long duration, and stable platform for sensory reconnaissance, what else if logical but a flying wing design? Even the U-2/TR-1 manned aircraft follow the same philosophy.

 

[Drawn_Sword_of_God]

i hope irani quickly reverse engineers it and share is tech with china

 

[bdslph]

IRAN can reversed engineer it easily but they will have to help from Russia for some part

good luck Russia Iran and China and also Pakistan should go for it to know what is in there